How the Chinese Viewed their Past - Through their Stories
Looking into the past via drama.
Pictured: part of the Qianlong Court’s painting Along the River During Qingming - 1736) [the careful observer might note no women are in the audience, I don’t know why]
This essay is part of a set of essays on the topic of Chinese Theater. Other essays are:
The Chinese theater offers a remarkably large window into the past. It is far from a perfect window but it is very revealing none-the-less. As mentioned in a previous essay [A Short History of Chinese Theater], there are thousands of Chinese plays still existent. Tan Ye estimates there are more than 4,700 scripts of Chinese theater, and at least 500 others have been lost.
The Theater scripts were written starting around 1100 CE and stopped being written around 1900. The majority of the Chinese plays are based on historical events. The common European behavior of setting plays in a deliberately artificial world - so as to avoid being attacked by relatives of the villains - is almost entirely missing from Chinese theater.
This must be emphasized: Chinese playwrights usually stayed very close to historical records in most of their plays. When challenged, the writer could cite at least one historic source for the actions he described. In Europe, historical plays like the 10 histories which Shakespeare wrote are very uncommon. In China, they were the norm. Plays set in some mythic past are extremely rare in China. Outright fantasies do exist but most of them appear to be imports from other cultures.
The Chinese are remarkably in touch with their history because the theater makes use of that history all the time. Again, some of the history is wrong, and most of it is biased in certain directions. Once you know the real history, you can see the pattern of what stories were told, and what stories were untold. Just to be clear: the Sonoma Sage knows the real history of China.
The Early Stories
The early stories are drawn from an era called Spring-Autumn Annals. This period of time is roughly 700 BC to 500 BC, though a few ancient plays are set in the 100 years before Shi Huangdi takes the throne (300 to 225 BC). These plays are all very bloody. Usually most of the main characters are dead by the end of the play. The Ancient Age of China was merciless and cruel and the plays reflect this. No one looks back on this era with fondness.
The Han Dynasty Stories
There are a few stories set in the time when the first empire was falling apart and two men - Liu Bang and Xiang Yu - each raised massive armies and fought for control over what would become the 2nd Empire. As it happened, Liu Bang won the war and founded the Han Dynasty.
Most interesting to me was the discovery that the loser in this conflict, Xiang Yu, is considered to be the better man. One of the most famous Chinese plays is about Xiang Yu in his last days, called Farewell My Concubine (a strange movie was made about the play which won several awards in 1993). A few plays are set 200 years later when Wang Mang briefly took control of the Han Empire and tried to kill all the members of the royal family.
The Three Kingdoms Plays
More than 100 plays are set in this time period, and most plays are set in the years 192 -234 CE. Most of these plays are famous and they have been famous for more than 600 years. The major characters in these plays: Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhou Yu, Lu Bu, Ma Chao, and Zhuge Liang (Kong Min) are the most famous people in all of Chinese history. Every Chinese person knows something about these people. They are roughly analogous to King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, Mordred, Guinevere, Morgan La Fey, and Merlin. In fact, the parallels between King Arthur and the Saga of the Three Kingdoms are deep. [More on this another time]
The Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty (620 - 900 AD) - is the setting for a number of plays about love. If a writer wanted to create a love story, he would place it in the Tang. Love stories in the Tang usually end badly for the young lovers. They usually meet by chance, fall in love, and then can’t marry for some reason and then one or both die. The Chinese had a deep suspicion of love and so these stories should be seen as cautionary tales.
A huge multi-act play was set in the Tang period, but it was written in the Ming Dynasty. This is the story Journey to the West. There are about twenty major sub-stories in this large book, such as Monkey defeats the White Bone Demon or Monkey Defeats the 18 Arhats. Monkey King (Sun Wukong), Tang Priest (Tang Sanzang), Pigsy (Zhu Bajie), and Sandy (Sha Wujing) are the four most famous characters in Chinese stories. There is no Chinese person alive who doesn’t know the Monkey King.
The Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty (960 - 1276 CE) was 160 years of splendor and luxury followed by 150 years of failure and decline. A majority of all the important Chinese plays are set in this dynasty, though few were written in this era. A good number of plays are about the heroic failures known as the Yang family of heroes. The Yang family fought for the Song against their enemy to the north, the Liao - and they mostly died, heroically. In the stories the failure of the Yang heroes is blamed on corruption and infighting by Song government ministers as well as the Huangdi (emperor). This is a theme which is repeated again and again. The great Song general Yue Fei is literally arrested and killed by an evil Song minister despite the fact that Yue Fei was consistently victorious in his battles agains the Jin. Finally, as the Mongols renewed their attack on the Song in 1260, an utterly corrupt Song official (Jia Sidao) is stealing whatever money he can get his hands on, while the kingdom collapses.
The other big set of plays in the Song era are about the troubles which ensue when a man passes the Imperial Exam in the top position. Usually, the top student comes under a great deal of pressure to marry a very high ranking woman (a princess, the daughter of the chancellor, etc.). Invariably, the exam winner already has a wife and the dramas revolve around what he does with his first wife: does he kill her? Demote her? Or reject the marriage offered by these very powerful men in the government?
Often the resolution is simple: the Exam-winner marries the other woman also and its now up to the two women to work out their relationship. One rather amusing story is about a scholar who is so poor that he agrees to marry the daughter of the King of Beggars in Hangzhou. As one can easily imagine, the King of the Beggars may be rich, but he has almost no status because the King of the Beggars rules over the beggars, cripples, thieves, and con-men of the city. After passing the Imperial Exam, the formerly poor scholar tries to find a means of escaping from his first marriage - he does not succeed, and it all works out.
A final set of stories set in the Song era are about the Outlaws of the Marsh (AKA: Heroes of the Water Margin). Like the Three Kingdoms, the Outlaws of the Marsh was a book, written by an unknown author in the Ming Dynasty. Around 10 of the dramatic incidents in the book were turned into major plays.
The Ming Dynasty
Although at least a thousand plays were written in the Ming Dynasty, relatively few stories are set in the Ming Dynasty proper (1368-1645 CE). Most of the stories set in the Ming era are domestic dramas: arranged marriages which go wrong, or cases of mishandled criminal investigations - always based actual events.
In the Ming we start to see actual fantasy stories appear, these come from Southern China where people are more likely to believe in magic.
Nearly all of the Three Kingdoms stories were written during the Ming Dynasty, as were most of the Outlaws of the Marsh plays, and some of the Monkey King dramas.
The Qing Dynasty
More than two thousand Chinese theater scripts were written during the Qing Dynasty, including a number of massive plays with more than 50 acts. [I will say more on this in a later post]. However, like the Ming, relatively few plays were set in the Qing Dynasty.
There are a few comedies written in the Qing era. I believe these comedies appear thanks to contact with the Europeans, which started in 1500 but became increasingly important from 1700 onward. One comedy involves a young couple who try to remain silent throughout the first day of the Spring Festival (AKA: Chinese New Year). Another is about a pair of would-be heroic do-gooders who pretend to be Imperial Investigators and then a real Imperial Investigator appears on the scene.
A few stories written in the Qing period are clearly based on non-Chinese sources. One major set of plays is based on stories found in the Arabian Nights (really from Persia, not Arabia). A few stories seem to be European in origin, but with Chinese characters (examples: Bright Sun Pavilion, The Iron Bow, The Riddle of the Lantern Festival, and Ge Ma - which seems to be based on the Barber of Seville).
Summary
The Ancient world was an age of cruel and vicious killers. All the killing was pointless, the bad people never prospered.
The Three Kingdoms was an age of warrior heroes. This was a time when men were men, and women’s only role was to be beautiful and stay in the background. In most other plays, women are the primary moral agents. [More on this later].
The Tang was the time when men and women met and fell in love. This never worked out well for anyone and so love became a bad idea. Arranged marriages were clearly the best overall strategy for a happy life.
The Song was a time when the government routinely sabotaged it’s own military. China would never have been conquered if it weren’t for fast-talking government officials making a hash of everything. Sadly, there was no solution.
The Ming was a time of internal peace with a decreasing ability by government officials to properly manage their districts. Crimes committed by the rich and powerful were only punished when a rare upright official arrived in the district and that was the exception, not the rule.
The Qing was an era in which it was best not to talk the present times. Censorship was heavy and criticism of the government was forbidden. Instead, the major plays were largely set in the past. The audience could draw their own conclusions about the present based on stories from older ages.
[Later I will write about the curious voids in Chinese theater - the major events in Chinese history that were never mentioned]